


All for Want of a Nut

by Deejaymil



Series: Original Stories by a Bored Australian [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Crack, Gen, It's getting rather silly in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 09:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7527181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her father is a peanut farmer. His father was a peanut farmer. His father's father was a peanut farmer. They live and die by the peanut, for the peanut.</p><p>She's allergic to peanuts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All for Want of a Nut

**Author's Note:**

> This is absolute silliness.

 

The air in the room settles heavy in her lungs, difficult to breathe and cloaked in death. Tightly shuttered windows seal in the cloying perfume of peanut oil from the scented candles spread throughout the room.

Her father’s skin is jaundiced, paper thin and waxy in texture. His eyes follow her around the room, stained with the same yellow tinge. His once confident hands shake against the starched sheets pulled over him. She knows this is the oldest he will ever be.

His hair is flat against his skull, the blonde faded to a pale imitation of its former vibrancy. Her hair, so unlike both her parents in its vivid red hues, seems full of life and vitality in comparison. She tucks a stray strand behind one ear, almost ashamed of her vigour in the sickroom.

She inhales the acrid scent of the peanuts, her family’s sworn cure for all ailments, and crosses her finger quickly for luck. A pagan superstition, one that she’d grown out of, but that her parent’s still held dear.

She longs for the company of her husband. He waits outside, unable to enter the home for fear of the air that hung heavy with the scent of generations of peanuts, a deathly allergy to him.

They were peanut farmers. Her father was a peanut farmer, her grandfather was a peanut farmer, and she was all set to inherit the farm and continue the tradition. Her whole life she had lived, breathed and studied peanuts. They were all she knew.

Until she’d met her husband and her world had grown.

“We’ve had our hard times,” her father wheezes. She picks up a glass of water and holds it to his lips, shaking slightly and threatening to spill the liquid down his frail chin. “We’ve done things, things we regret. Made choices we’re not proud of.”

He closes his eyes and breathes heavily for a moment. She wonders if he’s remembering the blistering argument they’d had when she’d announced that she was going to marry the Fragaria boy and move to the city to study art. Or maybe he’d fallen back into the fever of his memories, mind becoming more fractured by the day.

“I never liked John Fragaria.” His voice cracks as he speaks.

“I didn’t marry John Fragaria,” she reminds him sternly, tugging the sheet out of his clutching fists and straightening it. “I married his son.”

“A strawberry farmer, of all things,” he continues, nose wrinkling as though he could consider no lowlier calling. “Soft, messy things. No crunch to them. No uses other than silly scents or decorating fiddly cakes.”

She sighs. Her father’s hatred of strawberries was such that they had never been allowed to have anything vaguely related to strawberries in their house. It hadn’t been until she was eleven that she had first tasted a strawberry at a school field trip, only to immediately suffer a terrible allergic reaction.

Her father watches her with wet eyes and she thinks for a moment that he’s gone wandering in his own mind again. “All done terrible things, things we need forgiving for even when done for the right reasons.”

Suddenly she’s not so sure that his mind is wandering, and she sits on his bed carefully and waits. There’s a tense kind of silence in the room until his gaunt hand reaches over and rests on hers, squeezing lightly. “Your husband, the Fragaria…”

“I’m a Fragaria now,” she points out and he makes an angry noise in his throat, eyes still locked on hers.

“He’s cursed,” her father says and her heart sinks. “He was cursed as a babe, just as you were blessed.”

She gets up to call to her mother to bring something to help her father rest, but as her hand brushes the doorhandle he speaks again, so quiet she almost misses it. She turns and feels horror seeping through her at the slackened expression on his face, knows that death is in the room with them with his bony fingers wrapped around her father’s heart.

“We never bore no daughter. Your mother only ever birthed a boy.” He coughs, the sound rattling in his chest. “A cursed boy. Before he was born, Fragaria bet me that his child, not mine, would be the greatest thing our farms had ever produced. I couldn’t face his mockery when he saw what I had sired.”

She reels at the implication behind his announcement. “Father, stop. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

His eyes are clear as they meet hers. “Be quiet girl, let me have my confession. I know exactly what I say,” he whispers. “He couldn’t even bear the slightest contact with our lifeblood, the air here was deadly to him. I carried a cursed boy into those woods, intending to lay him down for the beasts to claim.”

“You left a child in the woods?” She’s stricken with disbelief.

He laughs, the noise crackling in his throat. “Would you believe my shock when upon completing my task, I came upon another child left in those trees, a girl with hair as red as those newfangled strawberries my blasted neighbours grow?”

“He always thought he was so much more high and mighty than me, that John Fragaria with his red hair, and his strawberry farm. Guess he couldn’t face the shame of having a daughter with a similar complaint. His loss, for he was right. You truly are the greatest thing to have come out of my farm.”

He gasps once more, eyes rolling about in his skull. His final words are forced but there’s a glimmer of satisfaction there. “Guess John was just like me all along.”

There are no more words. She sits silently by the bedside of the man who raised her until dusk breaks and he breathes no more.


End file.
